MEAT HUNTER How to Feed Your Family with Your Gun Table of Contents

MEAT HUNTER How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun Table of Contents A Sign of the Times . 3 History Lessons . 4 Food For Consumers Is Easy Today…But Farms Are Not Self-Sufficient . 6 Hunting Can Feed Your Family . 7 Meat Hunting Vs . Trophy Hunting . 8 The Basic Necessities . 9 Small Game . 10 Large Game . 10 Bullets, Bunnies, Birds, and Bambi: Size Matters . 12 One Way To Improve Accuracy . 14 Bow Hunting For Survival … Or Not . 14 Fish Food . 15 A Word of Warning: Polluted Waters . 17 Trapping . 18 Foothold Traps . 19 Body Gripping Traps . 19 Snares . 20 Regulatory Issues . 20 You’ve Killed It . Now what? . 21 Butchering Small Game Animals . 21 Dressing Small Game Birds . 22 Dressing Large Game . 23 Conclusion . 24 Sidebars: How To Skin A Rabbit And Other Small Game: A Checklist . 22 How To Skin A Deer . 23 Information Resources . 24 2 How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun MEAT HUNTER A Sign of the Times Each year in Wisconsin and several other states, tons of venison are donated through the “Hunt for the Hungry” program . For over 15 years, this program has provided much-needed meat for lower-income Americans . But in a sign of the times, donations fell sharply once the recession of 2008 hit . It wasn’t that fewer deer were harvested; it was that hunters needed to feed their own families . Hunting today is considered more of a sport and less a necessity, but the economic climate is changing that for many Americans . This isn’t the first time that Americans have turned to hunting to put meat on the table . In fact, it’s only in the past couple of generations that we have gotten away from the land when it comes to putting food on the table . But perhaps it’s time to take a look back and relearn the lessons of yesteryear . The wooded and wilderness areas of the country are still rich in game, large and small, and in these troubled times, it represents a bonanza of food for hungry families . 3 MEAT HUNTER How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun History Lessons In rural America during the Great Depression, local banks went bust, leaving rural families with only a couple of dollars in their pockets . The Great Plains entered a nine-year drought . Farmers not only lost crop income, but also lost the ability to raise food on their own land . Families that once relied on their hard work to coax food from fertile ground were plunged into poverty and hunger . Many farms had vegetables, fruit trees, egg-laying chickens, and often a milk cow . Yet all across the nation, meat (beef, pork, and poultry) tended to be expensive . At the worst of the Great Depression in 1935, the average per capita consumption of meat was just 75 .6 pounds for the whole year .i Contrast that with 160 .7 pounds per capita consumed in 2009 . As a result, rural families relied on hunting every day to supply one-quarter to one-third of their diets with meat . With gasoline being an expense many could not afford, most hunting during the Great Depression was done within walking distance of the farmhouse . Typically, young boys would go hunting early each morning before going to school . Some were even forced to quit school to provide for their families . While the firearms used were far simpler and far less expensive than the ones used today, ammunition was still a costly expense . In many families, every shell was expected to bring game home to the dinner table . Men who grew up then recall how they were given only one round for their .22 caliber rifles to use for hunting the day’s meat . One story tells of Clarence Schultz of Duluth who had nineteen reasons to go hunting . Reasons 1-17 were himself and his 16 brothers and sisters . Reason 18 was his mother—who sent him out to hunt with his .22-caliber rifle and warned him not waste any shells . According to his boyhood friend, Jeff Langford, “For a nickel, you got ten .22 shells . If he didn’t come back with ten rabbits, his mom would give him a whippin’ ”. And that was reason #19 .ii Rabbits and other small game were common table fare during the Great Depression . A man with the handle of OldStudent posted on an online discussion board about his father, who had hunted as a boy in the 1930s . OldStudent related family lore that “[his father’s] sisters would get mad at him for all the rabbits—they were sick of eating rabbit ”. Unfortunately deer were hard to find iii. 4 How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun MEAT HUNTER By 1937, the estimated deer population for all of Missouri was down to only 2,000 iv. Whitetail deer and most other big game had been nearly wiped out in the late 1800s by market hunters sending meat to Europe . They nearly hunted deer to extinction from Pennsylvania to the Rockies . During the Great Depression, hunting almost destroyed this endangered population for good . Wild turkey nearly vanished, and even to this day, it is still difficult to find this shy bird in parts of the southeast United States . Hunting wasn’t the only way families supplied themselves with meat during the Depression . Trap lines were used to capture small game such as raccoon, muskrat, opossum, squirrel, and ground hog . Trapping not only provided food, but also valuable hides from fur-bearing animals such as mink and fox used by the clothing industry . Families also put fish on the dining table using any means necessary, including illegal methods such as “noodling” and “trout tickling ”. For- tunately, most local sheriffs sympathized In this iconic 1936 photograph, Depression-era photographer Dorthea with their neighbors Lange captured the grim heartache experienced by so many Americans at the time. Florence Owens Thompson and her children had been living in a and turned a blind tent, subsisting on vegetables gleaned from surrounding fields and birds the eye when it came to children killed. The photograph was snapped just after Florence had sold hungry hunters going the tires from her car to buy food. over the legal bag limit . 5 MEAT HUNTER How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun Food For Consumers Is Easy Today…But Farms Are Not Self-Sufficient Agriculture has changed considerably since the 1930s . It has now become a specialized rotating monoculture—that means growing corn one year, soybeans the next, and not a lot else . The cost of seed, fertilizer, and machinery can leverage a farm into millions of dollars of debt . Nebraska farm wife Helen Bolton observed that modern farmers are completely different from those who survived the 1930s: “They don’t have chickens . They don’t milk . They don’t bake bread . They don’t do anything like that, and they don’t can too much anymore . Of course, a lot of women work in town, now days ”. v Most Americans are so accustomed to convenience that many view it as an entitlement . More and more people have fled the suburbs and built single-family homes in once-rural areas, creating a checkerboard of “farmettes” and small estates . While these spreads have the outward look and feel of self-sufficient homesteads, it’s an illusion; most rely on Walmart more than their own gardens . Politicians are squabbling over economic policy in Europe and at home . Citizens angered at government bailouts to corporations have taken to the streets all around the world . With this back drop, is it any wonder that in October of 2011, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke guardedly warned Congress that the “recovery is close to faltering ”. vi 6 How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun MEAT HUNTER Hunting Can Feed Your Family In spite of modern conveniences and a Walmart on every corner, hunting, fishing, and trapping are still inexpensive ways to provide meat to your family . Wild meat has an advantage over most of the meat available in stores today, too . It’s not loaded with antibiotics and hormones, or fed an artificial diet . Lucky for us, big game has rebounded and is plentiful . Since the 1950s, deer populations have exploded . Current estimates put them at about 20 million and in some areas they are considered a dangerous nuisance .vii According to State Farm Insurance, there were an estimated 2 .3 million collisions between deer and vehicles in the U .S . between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2010 .viii Wild hogs, the legacy of our ancestors who let their pigs feed in unfenced meadows and forests, have overrun much of Texas and the Gulf Coast . Feral swine are a problem in 40 states . Breeding populations exist as far north as Michigan . Yet, for all the squealing going on over their numbers, wild hogs represent a virtually untapped food resource . In addition, they taste just as good as pen-raised pork from the grocery store—and tend to be leaner . Meanwhile, the wild turkey population, which nearly shrunk to 30,000 birds nationwide in the 1930s, has surged back with an estimated population of 7 million birds .ix The meat is out there in the fields, across the streams, and in the hollows in abundance . There’s just one catch: you have to catch it . Wild hogs represent a virtually untapped food source as far north as Michigan. 7 MEAT HUNTER How To Feed Your Family With Your Gun Meat Hunting vs . Trophy Hunting Does meat hunting differ from sport hunting? Yes .

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